[editor-hints-devel] Comments about defreadtable

[Robert P. Goldman]

Luis Oliveira wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Here are a few random thoughts with regard to defreadtable:
> 
>   1. This mechanism seems useful enough to me that the
>      non-editor-related bits could live in a separate
>      package/system/project.

Agreed.
> 
>   2. Readtables should be named by symbols, not strings, in order to
>      avoid collisions between different code bases. Also, I suggest
>      defreadtable should signal a warning (or a style-warning) if a CL
>      or KEYWORD symbol is used to name a readtable. Again, the goal is
>      to avoid collisions.

I don't actually agree with this point.  Tobias has tried here to make
readtables act like packages, and this change would destroy that
commonality.  It would also make the use of readtable specifiers in mode
lines problematic.

I actually think that having all package names share a single global
namespace is not a desirable feature of CL, but it's not fixable by us,
and I think the arguments for making readtables act like packages are
strong.

If the CL community is to manage to grow and deal with larger sets of
libraries, we will have to evolve some kind of convention to avoid name
collisions across packages, possibly something like the java package
naming convention, foo.bar.bletch, and we should be able to extend that
to readtable naming.

> 
>   3. MAKE-DISPATCH-MACRO-CHARACTER functionality is missing.  Perhaps
>      the :DISPATCH-MACRO-CHAR directive can check for
>      (null (get-macro-character macro-char)) and create that
>      dispatch-macro, or maybe another directive would be better.
> 

This seems like a good idea.

Best,
R



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